Phoenix’s Canals
An Ancient Inheritance
The canal system represented in Mesa’s Park of Canals became the first ever to win the Award for Excellence in Prehistoric Engineering from the American Society of Civil Engineers, on-site information panels report. It’s 1400-year-old recipients might have delighted in the honor.
Mesa, Arizona formed in 1878, when Mormon settlers chose canals built by ancient Hohokam Indians as the best way to supply communities with water. Since gravity flow wouldn’t transport water for their mesa settlement’s irrigation needs, they turned to the preexisting Hohokam canal. They replaced an aged bulk head with a new one and cleaned out the old canals with slips and Fresno scrapers, connecting it to the Mormon Pioneer extension.
It worked.
Arizona Experience explains Hohokam canals, “wide at the mouth and carefully tapered,” shrank the channel as the flow rate dropped. This propelled water flow “up the bluff, seemingly in defiance of the Law of Gravity.”
Today’s commemorative park includes three of the ancient water channels, ramadas, a playground and botanical garden. Canals in use now enclose the park on both its northern and southern edges, paralleling their historic predecessors.
A family trying out a MacCaw parrot emerged from a van in the site’s parking lot. I learned a store called Bird Nest, half a block away, had raised him from two months’ of age. The couple who had rented him was waiting to see if he would bond. So far he had, meaning he might join them to stay.
Several other visitors came and went: a Latino caregiver on his daily amble, a group of women in conservative dresses that resembled those of early pioneers and a gaggle of children. A chatty little girl gasped when she heard the canal ditch beneath the bridge was built by “Indians.”
In a study that analyzed “more than a decade’s worth of public opinion surveys,” a 2014 joint MIT-UCLA study identified Mesa as the most conservative city in America, Politico reports. The Politico piece described conservativism as a trait less characteristic of major American cities, more characteristic of rural areas. Mesa, with its 57 percent Mormon population (according to the LDS Newsroom), was a striking exception.
Politico’s Ethan Epstein writes:
“Because it only really began to grow quickly in the 1940s and ’50s, Mesa followed the classic postwar development pattern most famously embodied by Levittown, New York: miles of modest, single family homes in subdivisions, wide boulevards meant for speedy driving and shopping centers boasting ample parking. In sum, the bulk of Mesa is quintessentially suburban. As former mayor (Scott) Smith puts it, Mesa attracts those who think ‘being boring is OK.’”
Yet an ancient engineering marvel has endured in excellent condition for over a thousand years here, preserved in sunny silence and nearly forgotten. Anyone who takes this town for granted might miss it.
